


open the floodgates (and abandon the sluice)

by savage_starlight



Series: after many miles [5]
Category: UnDeadwood (Web Series)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-typical language, F/F, Found Family, Gen, M/M, Mason Family Reunion, The saga of pining continues, Travis didn't tell us Mason's backstory so I'm giving him one myself
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:35:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25852225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/savage_starlight/pseuds/savage_starlight
Summary: In the shadows out west, a man without eyes watches the lands. Watches the miner’s camp. Watches the train with the thief on it. Watches the girl with the quick hands and the preacher who guards a town whose name is as lifeless as his eyes are when he wakes up alone at night.He smiles, and he waits, and he watches. He does as he always does. He shuffles the deck.(The Mason family reunion nobody was expecting, least of all them.)
Relationships: Matthew Mason/Clayton Sharpe, Miriam Landisman/Arabella Whitlock
Series: after many miles [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1535678
Comments: 15
Kudos: 35





	open the floodgates (and abandon the sluice)

**Author's Note:**

> I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M DOINNNNNNGGGGGG!!! Howdy y'all, I'm back again, this time with a multichapter that hopefully? will work out eventually? Basically I got this idea two days ago, the Undeadwood discord encouraged me, and now we're here and hopefully I'll actually go somewhere with this. Endless thanks to Hannah (tragicallynerdy) and Eld (afearsomecritter) in particular for cheerleading/goading me into actually doing something with this.
> 
> This chapter is mostly set up, and I have no clue how long this will be. There should be more action in the next chapter though. For sake of context, the ages/original names of the Reverend's family are as follows. Ruthanne Matthews (aka Ruth/Ruthie, four years older than the Reverend), Gideon Matthews (two years older than the Reverend), Garrett Matthews (the Reverend himself) and Rebecca 'Becky' Matthews (three years younger than the Reverend.) I am trying very hard not to think about timeline logistics so if there's any historical fuckery/age weirdness, please just assume that I Meant To Do That even though I likely didn't.
> 
> Tags will be updated as the story progresses - I have a vague idea of where this is going, but that's about it. Don't worry, I'm just as surprised by what happens as anyone else is, usually. The title for this one is taken from "New Jerusalem" by Bear's Den, which is a song I associate pretty strongly with my headcanons of the Reverend's family life.
> 
> Anyway. Enough out of me. Hope y'all enjoy the story and I'll try to be back with more soon!

The last thing Garrett Matthews sees of his brother is his back.

He’s young when it happens. Barely twelve. It’s two in the morning when the sound of something stirring across the room wakes him up somehow, though he’s always been a heavy sleeper and there’s no logical reason why something so quiet would wake him. He pushes himself up onto an elbow and squints blearily across the room to where Gideon is sitting up on his bed, a messy haired silhouette turned toward the window like he’s looking for something.

Garrett (he is not Matthew Mason, not yet) props himself on an elbow and blinks heavily. “Wha’s happening, Gid?” he asks, voice a little too loud, slurred with sleep. “You hear somethin’?”

Gideon jumps like he’s just been electrocuted. Says a word their momma woulda scolded him for, if she weren’t five hundred miles west of here and six feet underground. Glares at Garrett, his pale eyes nearly reflective in the sliver of moonlight through the window. “The hell are you doin’ up?” he snaps, sounding more defensive than angry.

Garrett shifts in his bed, frowns. “I’m up because you woke me up,” he mutters. “Why’re _you_ up?”

“Cause I wanna be, jackass,” Gideon says. “Why don’t you just shut up and go back to sleep? Ain’t your business.”

“If you heard a wolf or somethin-’”

“I said it ain’t your business,” Gideon half-hisses. “Now shut up like I told you to, hear me? Mister Roland’ll tan us both if you wake him up yammerin’ right now.”

The bite in his words stings something deep in Garrett’s chest, something that makes his eyes burn. “I just wanted to know why you were awake,” he mumbles, laying back down and turning on his side, away from Gideon’s irritation, from the all too obvious way that he isn’t looking back at him or paying him any mind at all past the grumbling. “Thought maybe somethin’ was wrong.”

“There ain’t nothin’ wrong, Garrett. Now go to sleep or you’re gonna be tired when you wake up and it’ll be hell all day for all of us.”

Garrett doesn’t notice the way he trips on the last word, how he starts to say _you_ before correcting himself. He remembers it later though. He remembers a lot of things later. He regrets them for a long time after that. “Fine,” he mutters instead, and buries his face in his pillow. “Have a nice time contemplating your navel or whatever it is you’re doing, then. I don’t care.”

Gideon doesn’t respond after that. It takes a long time before Garrett falls asleep, but he does eventually. He sleeps through the sound of Gideon climbing on his bed. Sleeps through the window opening. Sleeps through to the morning, when Missus Roland comes to his door with Ruth and Becky in tow and swings the door open and says it’s time to wash up and freezes halfway through the words.

He wakes slowly at first. Then Missus Roland drops the basin she’s holding and the glass shatters and he shoots up out of bed in a panic, looks around for trouble, paying no mind to the water soaking across the floor, the pale cast of Missus Roland’s face and the way Ruth is shaking her head and holding Becky behind her like she doesn’t want her to see.

Then he notices the window, open as a shocked mouth, early morning breeze tugging easy at the curtains. Beneath it, Gideon’s bed is empty, every sign he was ever there all but erased.

(“It wasn’t you, Garrett,” Ruth will tell him later. “Gideon left because leaving is in our blood. He didn’t go because of you or Becky or any other silly reason you got in your head.” He’ll nod at the words, but he won’t believe her.)

The last thing Garrett Matthews sees of his brother is his back, turned away as he looked toward the window and the world beyond it like he was looking for a way out. Like he was looking for anything at all.

* * *

It’s four years later when Garrett follows in Gideon’s footsteps. Sixteen years old and scared half out of his mind, he tugs at the too short sleeves of his shirt, watches the toes of his shoes as if they’re gonna give him a better option. The war is creeping closer and he knows it. Mister Roland talks about it every day. Ruth has to leave, because she’s marrying Martin Buckley from up North, and Martin Buckley ain’t poor but he’s not well enough off to take in both Becky and Garrett both along with his new bride-to-be.

(Garrett doesn’t like Martin, doesn’t like the hungry glint in his eyes whenever someone brings up the prospect of making a little money, doesn’t like the way it reminds him of his own eyes when he looks in the mirror sometimes, still skinny and poor and desperate for something more than this, something bigger than a life spent scraping by on someone else’s rapidly thinning charity. He doesn’t like the way Martin smiles at Ruth like she’s simple-minded, and talks about Becky like she’s got no mind at all. He knows Ruth doesn’t like it either and that Becky likes it even less but- Becky’s been through a lot. She can manage through this, too.)

His shoes aren’t giving him any answers. Garrett shoulders his knapsack of what few possessions he has – some clothes, some sketches, his momma’s rosary, dustier than a farm in drought – and fiddles with a string at the end of his shirt. He has to go. He knows he does. Ruth can only help one of them and they both know it will be Becky. If he doesn’t leave now, she’ll always blame herself for that. He knows her all too well.

He looks up at his own reflection in the mirror before him and jumps about six feet in the air at what he sees. Behind him, Becky is standing in the doorway, her arms crossed and her eyes furious. He turns to face her and the look on her face makes the lump in his throat burn like copper wire, blood and barbs tangled around his tongue.

“So that’s it then?” she asks out loud, her voice cold and quiet in the early morning. The disappointment in her tone hits him harder than her hands ever could. “You’re leaving too.”

 _I don’t have a choice._ That’s what Garrett wants to say, but he knows better. He swallows hard around the ache in his chest. “I hear soldiers get paid quite a bit,” he mumbles, almost sheepish. “I oughta be able to come back when it’s over.”

Becky laughs at that, poisonous and cold. “Soldiers don’t come back, Garrett. And you ain’t gonna come back neither.”

He’s thought about that. He doesn’t want to, but he has. He’s thought about how it would feel to have his own blood soaking his hands and his shirt, has wondered if God is real and if He’s out there in the fields with all the poor fuckers he hears are dying these days and if he’ll meet Him if he does this or if the end of the road is just darkness, quiet and deep as drowning. “I’m gonna try.” His voice shakes but he still means it. “I don’t- I don’t intend to be gone forever.”

“You won’t come back,” Becky says, more firmly this time. “And even if you do, I won’t know you. You won’t be my brother.”

Matthew blinks, stunned. “Course I will. I’m always gonna be your brother, Becky, what are you-?“

“You won’t be my brother,” she interrupts, and her voice is cold as stone.

He’s not sure if it’s prophecy or a promise. Maybe it’s both. He protests anyway. “I’m gonna come back.”

Becky laughs again. “No,” she says. “You won’t.” Then she steps aside. Shakes her head and turns away. “Go on then if you’re going. Ruthie was right. Running really is in you men’s veins.”

There’s nothing for him to say to that. She walks out of the room and doesn’t look back and he hears the door close down the hall and he wants to open it again, wants to hug her like they’re kids and tell her it’s a mistake, that she misunderstood.

The trouble is, she understands perfectly. He doesn’t believe in God, but he doesn’t believe in lying either.

In the end, he doesn’t run away. He walks. Leaves a note on the table for Ruth and both the Rolands to find. It’s better like this. Their family isn’t good with goodbyes.

He joins the army as Garrett Matthews, and he clings to that name like it’s a goddamn lifeline. It doesn’t save him, but he holds to it nonetheless, through those first hard months and the harder ones after that. He likes the horses better than he likes the people, and likes the fighting not at all. He tries like hell to keep himself alive but in the end, Becky’s right and he knows it. He isn’t coming back from the war. Nobody does.

He leaves the army and the fort smoldering behind him, leaves the old name in the ashes of what’s left like a coat that don’t fit him right anymore but could still keep someone else warm. He doesn’t look back, not even once. Becky was right about that too – the men in their family don’t have much fondness for aftermath. They just like to run.

* * *

Ruthanne Buckley, nee Matthews, does not enjoy her husband’s company. She doesn’t like the way he wraps an arm around her waist every time she speaks to another man, the way he dresses her up in the closest thing to finery he can manage like she’s some trophy he’s looking to show off. She thinks sometimes that she might even hate him – how he’d smiled like he was talking to a child when he’d said he could only care for her and one of the others all those years ago, just before Garrett ran away. “I simply don’t have the means to be charitable to everyone, Ruthanne, family or not,” he’d said, looking up almost idly from the gun he’d been polishing, and she’d wanted to reach out and wrap the barrel around his neck.

It’s been nigh on fifteen years now since Gideon left, almost ten years since Garrett followed suit. Six months ago, Becky had done the same. Ruth still keeps the note tucked in the bosom of her dress, even though she’s long since memorized the slant of the letters, the desperation behind every word.

 _(One of them has to be out there, Ruthie,_ Becky had written, and the paper had been wrinkled where something wet had splattered on it. _I gotta find them. I at least gotta try._ )

Beautiful, brave, reckless Becky. Of course she’d gone looking. Ruth still wonders if she’d found any leads, if she knows where she’s going or if she just wanted to be gone. She feels that same wanderlust clawing inside the marrow of her bones sometimes, the desperate urge to run away from Martin Buckley and every gilded thing he stands for. There is nobody left for her to protect and she thinks that maybe saving herself is the best she can hope for anymore.

She looks at the knapsack she keeps tucked in the drawer and thinks, _what’s left for me to lose?_

* * *

Nine months after Becky leaves, she dreams of a faceless man in a darkened saloon, the place where his eyes should be obscured by the shadows of his hat. He splays out three cards in the middle of the table, turns them over one by one. The first is Becky. The second is her. She stops him before he can turn over the third, doesn’t want to find out who is missing, where the fourth card went.

Which one of her brothers is lost for real now? Which one of them will she not get back?

“What would you give to see them again?” the man questions, his voice smooth and dark as an oil slick. “What would you do to save them?”

Ruth sits down at the table and draws the cards closer to herself, desperate and greedy. “Name your price,” she says, and the man smiles.

* * *

She wakes up with a start. Her heart is pounding and her veins are buzzing with electricity and she is not sure if she is afraid or excited, if she wants to sing or if she wants to scream until her throat is bloody and aches the way the rest of her does. In the end, she does neither. She goes back to bed, and she does not sleep.

The next morning, Martin takes her hands and smiles at her, the expression as tarnished as it always is. “I’ve heard there’s gold out in the Dakotas,” he says, “and I thought we might go look.”

Ruth thinks it’s funny, how he phrases it like a suggestion when they both know he isn’t asking. She’ll come along because she has to, and she’ll end up being the watcher of a dozen fools just like Martin who think they’ll find their fortune chasing down water. There will be other women there just like her who never had another choice, and they’ll smile because gritting their teeth is the only way to go on anymore. They’ll bake pies and scrub clothes until the water runs red, but there won’t be any gold for them. There never is.

Ruth thinks of her dream, of the bag in her drawer. There is nothing left to lose. She smiles with a light that doesn’t reach her eyes and squeezes her husband’s hands. “I think that sounds like a marvelous opportunity, Martin. When will we be leaving?”

* * *

In the shadows out west, a man without eyes watches the lands. Watches the miner’s camp. Watches the train with the thief on it. Watches the girl with the quick hands and the preacher who guards a town whose name is as lifeless as his eyes are when he wakes up alone at night.

He smiles, and he waits, and he watches. He does as he always does. He shuffles the deck.


End file.
